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The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State: Manchukuo in comparative perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Prasenjit Duara
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Duara argues that the relationship between Manchukuo and Japan was a new form of imperialism, rather than a mirror-image of European imperialism. As Duara explains, the political relationship between the two showed “a strategic conception of the periphery as part of an organic formation designed to attain global supremacy for the imperial power.” The Japanese developed this strategy in response to growing nationalist movements by colonized people for independence after World War I. Many Japanese also thought they could win the cooperation of those movements by stressing their own frustrations at racial discrimination in the international sphere. Further exacerbating the sense that they were criticized by everyone, the Japanese faced racial discrimination when they tried to emigrate to Europe and North America and were refused even the principle of racial equality at the Paris Peace conference in 1919. Japan thus began to articulate itself as the anti-imperialist leader in Asia, set to lead the other Asian nations and throw off the yoke of western imperialism.

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Research Article
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Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 11 , Special Issue S8: Course Reader No. 8. The Japanese Empire: Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggles , January 2013, pp. 64 - 84
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References

Notes

1) Anthony Pagden, “The Empire's New Clothes: From Empire to Federation, Yesterday and Today” in Common Knowledge 12:1 Winter 2006, (36-46), 13-14. The present essay is a revised and extended version of my response to Pagden in the same volume. Prasenjit Duara, “Nationalism, Imperialism, Federalism and the Example of Manchukuo: A Response to Anthony Pagden” Common Knowledge 12:1 Winter 2006 47-65. For another expansive and revisionist view of empire, see also Frederick Cooper Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005.

2) The German case also exhibited many aspects of this new imperialism (see below). However, Nazi racism and defeat in the war obscure the extent to which Germany would have developed along these lines. Manchukuo, on the other hand, represents a moment of the new imperialism before the wartime drive destroyed it.

3) It is also to be distinguished from the older historiographical term “new imperialism” referring to the late 19th century scramble for Africa and efforts to “slice the Chinese melon” among other developments that destabilized the imperialism of free trade. Creating nominally sovereign modern nation-states was not part of that imperialism.

4) Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994), 34-58. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Construction of Peoplehood: Racism, Nationalism, Ethnicity,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Etienne Balibar and Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 81-82.

5) See Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Program, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 102; and Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 152-53.

6) Stephen Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy, 1914-1940 (London: Frank Cass, 1984), 25, 276. Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1850-1960 (London: Routledge, 1993), 148-59.

7) As quoted in D. Bruce Marshall, The French Colonial Myth and Constitution-making in the Fourth Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 44.

8) Marshall, French Colonial Myth, 224-26.

9) Barry Eichengreen and Jeffrey A. Frankel, “Economic Regionalism: Evidence from Two Twentieth-Century Episodes,” North American Journal of Economics and Finance 6.2 (1995): 97.

10) See Richard Overy, “World Trade and World Economy,” in The Oxford Companion to World War II, ed. Ian C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

11) Sub Park, “Exploitation and Development in Colony: Korea and India,” Korean Journal of Political Economy 1.1 (2003): 5.

12) Sub Park, “Exploitation and Development,” 19.

13) C. Walter Young, The International Relations of Manchuria: A Digest and Analysis of Treaties, Agreements, and Negotiations Concerning the Three Eastern Provinces of China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 136-52.

14) Gavan McCormack, Chang Tso-lin in Northeast China, 1911-1928: China, Japan, and the Manchurian Idea (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977), 7-8.

15) Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, Making of Japanese Manchuria, 214-23.

16) Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, Making of Japanese Manchuria, 285.

17) Michael A. Schneider, “The Limits of Cultural Rule: Internationalism and Identity in Japanese Responses to Korean Rice,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, ed. Gi-wook Shin and Michael Robinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), 122.

18) Oguma Eiji, A Genealogy of “Japanese” Self-images, trans. David Askew (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2002), 125-42.

19) Komagome Takeshi, Shokuminchi Teikoku Nihon no Bunka Togo (The Cultural Integration of the Japanese Colonial Empire) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996), 236-37.

20) Yamamuro Shinichi, Kimera: Manshukoku no shozo (Chimera: A Portrait of Manzhouguo)(Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1993), 42-48.

21) Mark R. Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji and Japan's Confrontation with the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 167, 281, 335.

22) Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Reinventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 97-101.

23) Yamamuro Shinichi's Kimera emphasizes the parent-child relationship between the Japanese emperor and Pu Yi, but the image of brotherhood was also current, even in the passages that Yamamuro himself cites (261-64).

24) Oguma Eiji, Genealogy, 337.

25) See Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chap. 4.

26) Chianbu keisatsushi (Law and Order Ministry, Police Dept), ed. Komin (Citizen) (Xinkyo: Manshukoku tosho kabushiki geisha, 1940), 41.

27) Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire, 183-84, 213-15. Francis Clifford Jones, Manchuria Since 1931 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1949), 139.

28) Kungtu C. Sun, The Economic Development of Manchuria in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, ed. Ralph W. Huenemann (Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1969), 101-2.

29) Suk-jung Han, “Puppet Sovereignty: The State Effect of Manchukuo, from 1932 to 1936” (PhD diss, University of Chicago, 1995), chaps. 3-4.

30) Han Suk-jung, 1995, 233. Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904-1932. (Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ Press, 2001), 414.

31) Suk-jung Han, “Puppet Sovereignty,” chaps. 3-4.

32) Komagome Takeshi, Shokuminchi Teikoku no Bunka Togo 265.

33) Shao Yong, Zhongguo huidaomen (China's Religious Societies) (Shanghai: Renmin chubanse, 1997), 321.

34) Tominaga Tadashi, Manshukoku no minzoku mondai Shinkyo, 1943, 43-45.

35) Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji, 171, 174.

36) Further, creating similar institutions fostered a similarity of interests and goals between elites in the metropolitan and dependent societies. Thus Latin American societies have found it difficult to sustain socialist states or even large-scale public expenditures without incurring the disfavor of the United States; and the Soviet Union would not tolerate “market-happy” bourgeoisies. Manchukuo too began to resemble (and in several instances, led) the military-dominated dirigiste economy and centralized political system that developed in Japan beginning in the 1930s.

37) See Paul Marer and Kazimierz Z. Poznanski, “Costs of Domination, Benefits of Subordination,” in Dominant Powers and Subordinate States: The United States in Latin America and the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, ed. Jan F. Triska (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), 371-99.

38) John Coatsworth, Central America and the United States: The Clients and the Colossus (New York: Twayne, 1994), 18-19, 52-53.

39) Robert Freeman Smith “Republican Policy and the Pax Americana, 1921-1932” in William Appleman Williams ed., From Colony to Empire: Essays in the History of American Foreign Relations, John Wiley and Sons, NY, 1972. 273-275.

40) Andrew J Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy Harvard U P, Cambridge, MA 2002. 115-116. See also Bacevich for the quotation. 115.

41) Coatsworth 1994, 90-91.

42) Quoted in Robert Freeman Smith 1972, 271.

43) Carl Parrini, “The Age of Ultraimperialism,” Radical History Review 57 (fall 1993):7-9.

44) Parrini, “Age of Ultraimperialism,” 8-11. Bruce Cumings, “Global Realm with No Limit, Global Realm with no Name,” Radical History Review 57 (fall 1993): 53-54.

45) G. Arrighi, P K Hui, H F Hung and M Selden, “Historical capitalism, East and West” in G. Arrighi, T Hamashita, and M. Selden, ed, The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 year perspectives. Routledge, 2003, 301.

46) To be sure, even within the power structure in Manchukuo there were forces working for autonomy. On several occasions, special Japanese rights were attacked by the Kwantung army, most notably in 1936 when extraterritorial rights for Japanese citizens were abolished and a series of significant privileges began to unravel. The Japanese government also raised tariffs against the overwhelming exports from Manchukuo. In general, more recent research takes seriously the Kwantung army's autonomy from the despised civilian governments at home—at least until the war in Asia. Suk-jung Han, “Puppet Sovereignty,” 257-58. Young, Japan's Total Empire, 205, 211.

47) Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern, 2003, 67-70.

48) Komagome Takeshi, Shokuminchi Teikoku Nippon no Bunka Togo, 356-70.